“Same reason we do everything else…because we’ve always done it that way.”
-A Pastor friend of mine
Church Fads
Had lunch today with David Kinnaman, the President of the Barna organization, who’s a really charming guy with a good mind and an eye on the culture. He’s got a savvy take on where the church is and where it’s going. His book, unChristian, charts the PR of the Church, saying that for the 16-29 year old crowd, the church is perceived as homophobic, judgmental, hypocritical, political, etc.
Two questions remain for me from his book: we say the church shouldn’t be dogmatic because “they” don’t like that, but in fact, “they” are joining the most clear, dogmatic churches far faster than the more nuanced, circumspect ones. The “emerging church,” if it can even be given sufficient borders to be called a group or movement, is a branding that doesn’t promise to last. They have certainly captured the need to modernize the atmosphere of the church, but they are so theologically ill-defined that I don’t think they will be cohesive over time. And the fundamentalists will continue to grow.
Secondly, liberal 20 year olds often turn into conservative 40 year olds. I’m not sure that what 16-29 year olds think of the church today will be the same as what that same group thinks of the church in 15 years, after they’ve been through their divorces, illnesses, tragedies, burnouts, and the like. The church, for all its failings, may come to look more like their peer group over time.
We shall see, of course. In the meantime, I’d like to be called and fundamergent. We are radically middle of the road.
Calling
The number one mistake young adults can make in their careers is to settle for anything less than calling.
Our process of seeking calling is a simple one. We go to the best college we can get into, pick a major that most interests us, marry the person we feel the most strongly about, pick a career that seems most interesting, buy a house that suits our tastes, have kids when the time feels right, and then say, “Lord, just tell me what you’ve called me to.” We’re like ships that set anchor and then raise the sails.
Calling, or that exact match of one’s passions and the world’s needs, is the only place that’s going to feel right, like that plastic toy my son plays with where you each shape has only one hole that it fits through. There are, for everyone, very specific places of calling, holes that are shaped exactly for us.
And the most dangerous part of the process is stalling. We find a place that we are comfortable, or a place that we were called to at one point, and there we stay. Especially if we’re paid. Never mind the growing sense of boredom or disconnection. We’re going to make it work as looooong as we can, because surely, that which made us happy yesterday should make us happy today. Richard Rohr says that the biggest obstacle to us hearing God speak next is the way we heard him speak last.
For followers of Jesus, it should be the call or nothing.
Evocatio
The Romans carried out a practice called evocatio. Before going to war with an enemy, they would pray to the enemy’s gods. They would tell those gods that if they would bless Rome, instead of those patrons from whom they were used to receiving worship, Rome would give them the best worship that they had ever received. Essentially, before taking an enemy’s land, they would take their gods.
I was in an uncomfortable conversation with another pastor who didn’t like the orthodox leanings of my own church. She alluded to the fact that if I didn’t like the denomination’s increasing liberality, my congregation should just leave our property behind and go. Then she opened the Bible and quoted something to me that didn’t seem so much a matter of inspiration to her as a weapon to use in the argument.
And then I recognized it. When those of the religious left quote the Bible to me, I have the sense that they are practicing evocatio. They are praying to my God, but only, I think, to take our land.
is to
religion : knowing God :: water : wine
To Pastor or not to Pastor
A mom once called me at church and said, “Could you tell my son not to become a Pastor?”
“That might sound strange coming from me.”
“Well, he respects you.”
“Why should I tell him not to be a Pastor?”
“It’s a hard job and you don’t get paid that much.
….
Later, this was the conversation with her son.
“You shouldn’t become a Pastor.”
“Why?”
“It’s a hard job and you don’t get paid that much.”
“You do it. It can’t be that hard.”
Survey
1. Circle the value that is closest to your church’s heart as it pertains to worship style:
Familiarity
Innovation
2. Now fill in the blank:
People perceive the church as irrelevant because _________.
(Now go to the Apple store and ask them to get the ink off your monitor.)
Reconstruction?
Had a lecture from Craig Detwiler of Fuller Seminary this week on a staff retreat. Very provocative thoughts on the state of the contemporary church.
So…a strain of thought in the history of philosophy:
Plato and Aristotle are portrayed as having divided on the fundamental approach to knowledge, Plato insisting on the eternal forms that conceptually define all particulars, Aristotle debating that it is only in and through the particulars that we can come to construct universals. 
Augustine inherited Plato through the neo-platonists, and in turn translated Paul through his quasi platonic lens. Thus a thousand years of Christian theology ultimately leaned on Plato.
Descartes, for all of his functional agnosticism, declared that certain knowledge rested on rational universals (undergirded by the lower-case-g god of philosophy).
Derrida, as exemplar of the project of deconstruction, said that he lived in the place where forms are stamped into particulars. That is to say, at exactly that point where we try to force our universalizing (translated moralizing or absolutist) standards onto specific situations, Derrida was there to say, “No you don’t.” I like the way Foucault said it somewhere, that “Truth is the error which is irrefutable because it has been hardened by the long baking process of history.” Again, to translate, that is to say, concepts we accept as universally true and binding actually have a genealogy which expose them to be situational constructions.
So…deep breath…in the postmodern era, universals, whether they be religious, scientific, moral, or political, are unilaterally suspect, which doesn’t leave you anywhere to hang your hat.
A few people have taken a stab at “reconstruction” after a century of deconstruction. Robert Nozick proposed that there are “invariances,” or temporary moments where two subjects connect in a mutually agreeable objectivity. What I’m suggesting in my dissertation, which we can only hope is not as longwinded as this, is that in the act of preaching an invariance is created, but only for the fleeting moment of the sermon.
What I’m wondering is how offensive-to-impossible it is to revive teleology in a postmodern world. Every schmo walks around wanting to be “healthy,” physically and mentally. But health suggests a biologically predetermined end to humanity. Does that exist? And if so, can we wrap our arms around any concrete vision of what that is? If not, we’re wasting a lot of money on counseling. Is it, as Freud said, the ability to work and love effectively, or is it something more? And is “healthy,” subjective and nebulous as it is, metaphysically different from heavenly? Because if we accept that as a nominal lateral, then reconstruction happens whenever two or three people choose to build the kingdom of heaven on earth.
A Screwtape Letter
My Dear Wormwood,
It is with great pleasure that I respond to your latest query about vocabulary. You ask whether or not there is
real value in paying close attention to words, and whether or not your patient would just as well come to the same conclusions no matter what words you teach him.
Clearly, everything hangs on the words.
I have talked to you of the great use we have made of “Puritan,” destroying the real purity of the concept so that it comes to mean “prude.” You know that we are up all night doing construction on the word “Christian,” hanging on it all sorts of images and attachments that either have nothing to do with the meaning, something equivalent to “nice,” or sliding the impression of the word far away from the majority of the people to whom it actually applies and instead towards the extremists. Our hope is that they might one day look at any common racist, sexist, hate-monger, and muse to themselves, “He must be a Christian.”
However, there is one word over which we have presently taken full control, which I want you now to employ at every turn. The word is “progress” and its derivation “progressive.” See if you can’t lean pretty heavily on it each time some Christian value conflicts with the modern world. When his mother refers to the sexual mores of their faith, strike the word “progressive” in his head like a gong, and contrast the image of his mother with that of his girlfriend. You will most likely win that debate without even having it.
I will reveal to you the secret of why this works so well, on the condition that you do not even whisper it in your sleep, for fear that a few of them catch on and begin to discuss it in one of their dreadfully boring Bible studies. The word progress originally implied development against a standard. A piano player progresses by learning to play the notes on the page more accurately. The baseball player progresses by hitting more often and running faster along the rules of the game. However, we’ve got your patient already thinking that progress only means doing it differently than it used to be done. If his grandparents did it a certain way, and he does it differently, it must be because he is more educated and experienced than they, and must therefore have progressed. With our new twist on the word, the piano player could just as well bang out handfuls of random notes and call it progress because it is different than what came before. The baseball player could hurl the ball up into the crowd and run in circles yelling, “I’m playing better than ever before!” simply because he’s doing it differently.
The real danger of the original word “progress” was that the standard of the notes was straight and true for all time. We can’t very well have him believing in everlasting truth, can we? The rules of the game did not change, and that’s why the player could progress, playing better along the lines of those rules. What we are now calling progress is really hiding the word that the humans mean, which is “change.” But we have baptized the word change by teaching them to call it progress.
So when one of them abandons the faith for modernity, because no new thinkers hold to religion anymore, he calls himself progressive. However, as we know, at that moment the only ones making real progress are down here. And his senseless philosophical decision, like banging on the keys of the piano, is music to our ears.
Your affectionate Uncle Screwtape
Denominations
I’m persistently stunned by my colleagues’ inability to talk openly about the death of Protestant denominations in America. Denominations are a dimly glowing wick around which the fingers of time are closing, but you would guess that they think it’s the Olympic torch from the way they refuse to talk. Note that I do not find resistance in the form of alternative visions for the future of denominations, only resistance to open communication. I feel like financial giving to the denomination is a kind of overpriced life support because half the family is not ready to admit that the patient is gone.
So in general, when I talk about the decline of the denomination, I find myself trying to soften the blow by following up my observations with the disarming phrase, “I’m just saying.”
Rev. Dr. Dan Chun announced at the 2008 General Assembly that the PC(USA) had been losing members for 42 years and would cease to exist in 40 more. He’s being conservative, assuming a steady decline of 50,000 per year. However, to be honest, we lose more each year than the year before. I’m just saying. We don’t do ourselves any favors by refusing to talk about it. I’m pretty sure that talking about death doesn’t bring it on.
We would be wise to watch the closing years of the United Church of Christ. They are half the size of my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and dropping at about the same rate. There will be ways that the UCC turns off the lights gracefully and not so gracefully, and we should take it as a case study for preparing for our own final years.
But is this the worst of all things? Denominations are a temporary expression of an eternal reality. It’s the eternal reality that counts, not the temporary expression. So long as churches can faithfully witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, what’s the harm in changing form? What’s wrong with molting? For my colleagues who are too afraid to talk about death, would you be more open if we just pretend like Christianity is shedding its skin?
In any case, there are those for whom 40 years is more than a lifetime away, and they will go to their own rest peacefully before the denomination. So they don’t feel inclined to talk about it. There are those who are nervous about their pensions, so they don’t feel inclined to talk about it. Women in ministry have found life-giving affirmation within precious few denominations, ours being one of them, so the conversation brings them sadness and anxiety. Those whose professions are system dependent on a denomination are in trouble, so they won’t talk about it. But for the army of reasons, none of them have the power to change the coming reality.
So let’s take a hearty gulp from the honesty stein. Denominations are on the way out; Jesus is not.
Hardwired 